“Did you really call Roberta Smith a Dalek last night?” painter Kyle Staver, who was in the audience for the first night of The Review Panel at Brooklyn Public Library, asked moderator David Cohen on Facebook Wednesday morning. She was referring to the formidable New York Times critic and thus doubting her memory.  It was standing room only in the 220-seat Dweck Cultural Center on February 9, and by the end of the presentation the crowd was still animate with ideas as debate spilled out into a frigid Eastern Parkway.

What occasioned the strange pop cultural remark had nothing to do with the Doctor Who robots’ infamous “Exterminate, Exterminate” – although that might be some people’s misconception of the role of art criticism. What occasioned the remark instead was the on-stage seating arrangement. At the library artcritical ditched the “Politburo-style” set up, as Cohen called it, with speakers lined up behind a table, the format familiar in the panel’s first decade at the National Academy, Instead, speakers were given snazzy swiveling office chairs that made it easier to sweep around and watch the videos for the shows under review – Glenn Ligon at Luhring Augustine Bushwick, Charles Harlan at Pioneer Works in Redhook, and Katherine Bradford and Elisabeth Kley at CANADA on the Lower East Side. The seating was good for chemistry, that brew of consensus and dissent that is The Review Panel. Cohen’s other guests were novelist and nonfiction writer Siri Hustvedt and artist Alexi Worth. But as the evening wore on, the Times co-chief critic progressively rolled into a private corner, occasioning Cohen’s irreverent remark.

Judgements defied expectations, according to another Brooklyn artist, Brenda Zlamany, who attended a welcoming party in honor of artcritical at the Gallery at 1GAP over the street from the library. She had fully expected a love-in for studio neighbor Bradford, an artist with almost cult status in the Williamsburg scene, and was more worried for old college friend Ligon, who in his exhibition was venturing into split screen video for the first time. But there was equivocation from some towards Bradford’s largest canvases to date whereas speakers fell over each other in praise of Ligon’s subtle, novel take of a Richard Pryor performance. And there were as many remarks about Pryor as Ligon from a much exercised audience during the half-time open mic.  The podcast, due soon, will reveal all.

Up next in the series, March 8, are renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers joined, in their series debuts, by painter-critics Laurie Fendrich and longtime Brooklyn resident David Salle. They will be tackling Amy Sillman, Karen Kilimnik, Cameron Rowland and Mika Tajimo (for show titles and venue details, see the flyer below). The best way to ensure a seat in what will be an extra-crowded event during Armory week is to use the library’s ticketing service: brownpapertickets

The post Hot Gossip: Brooklyn and The Review Panel are Apparently an Item appeared first on artcritical.

Alexi Worth: Green Glass Doors at DC Moore Gallery, March 26 to April 25, 2015
Reviewed in these pages by Roman Kalinovski, this was a project room solo that played with boundaries on different levels. Perceptual provocateur Alexi Worth found a theme worthy of his visual mischief: the locked doors of almost completed building or renovation projects. The motif vied with his nudes on the beach or copulating couples precisely thanks to their chilly voyeur-inducing exclusion. Elaborate carpentry and mesh supports played off depiction against construction with surface wit and psychological depth.

Alain Kirili and James Siena at Art Omi, October 11, 2015 to January 3, 2016
This was a year of double exposures for sculptor Alain Kirili, who has divided his career of the last forty years between New York and his native Paris. Two shows brought his latest line-in-space sculptures in forged metal to two-person shows: two halves that add to more than one whole for an artist for whom dialogue, whether with peers, historic mentors or artists in other mediums (music or dance) is axiomatic rather than expedient. One show was with painter Bobbie Oliver at Peter Hionas Gallery, a coupling of the dealer’s suggestion; the other, however, very much of Kirili’s own devising, was with his friend James Siena at Art Omi in Columbia County, NY. Siena, legendary as a painter and draftsman, and whose sculpture also takes line for a walk, enjoyed his sculptural debut earlier this year at Pace Gallery.

Susannah Phillips at Lori Bookstein
A natural complement to the exquisite Morandi show a block away at David Zwirner Gallery, Susannah Phillips brought a brooding luminosity to her spatial meditations in paintings where the structural elements communicate with the silent intensity of still life. The mountainous scenery of several pictures created a tension between schematic reduction and observational presentness striking a chord somewhere between Milton Avery and Ferdinand Hodler, holding the elements – water, land, sky – in suspense. In more urban images, Richard Diebenkorn and Wilhelm Hammershoi were the presiding ghosts. Upping the ante in intensity were images of a nebulous space, perhaps a holding bay, ambivalent between interior and exterior, where forms pulsate in the dark.

Alternate Histories: Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Galerie St. Etienne, January 15 to April 11, 2015
Before New Yorkers could enjoy Seccessionist masterpieces amidst the plutocratic splendors and wafting caffeinated aromas of the Neue Galerie, the redoubt of Austrian and German Expressionism in this city were the altogether more sedate, businesslike premises of Galerie St. Etienne on 57th Street. This venue was a transplant from Vienna where it was founded in the 1920s by Otto Kallir, father of the present owner Jane Kallir, and originally named, indeed, the Neue Galerie. This jubilee exhibition brought together examples of the different strands that have ensured St. Etienne a crucial, vital role in New York art consciousness: arresting images from the likes of Schiele, Klimt, Kokoschka and Kollwitz; American “primitives” like Morris Hirshfield and Grandma Moses; and that fearless living expressionist (no need for any “neo” prefix) Sue Coe.

Tom of Finland at Artists Space, June 13 to September 13, 2015
Touko Laaksonen, better known to connoisseurs and masturbators everywhere as Tom of Finland, enjoyed a steamy double header at the sprawling SoHo and Tribeca premises of Artists Space this summer. On Greene Street an elaborate installation afforded intimate corridor upon corridor of framed drawings and collages from which his published images derived. With glistening graphite he caught the erogenous sheen of muscle-bound workmen bulging in denim and leather uniformed hulks encountering each other in ever-cheerful, spontaneous orgies: S&M with a smile was his hallmark. Down on Walker Street, an utterly exhaustive, thematic vitrine arrangement recalled the fact that  image horder Laaksonen’s background was in advertising. The exhibition archived his sources with an indexical totality that would have impressed Aby Warbug, a veritable iconology of lust.

Alex Katz at Barney’s, Spring 2015
Every year seems to be Alex Katz’s year as far as increased visibility for this prince of painters is concerned. Notwithstanding the absurdly overdue retrospective that New York museums are denying this realist master, 2015 saw its fair share of spectacular outings: new works that took startling liberties with expectations, at once reduxing and reinventing his familiar landscape motifs, closed the downtown space of Gavin Brown, for instance, while Mary Ryan showed a stunning set of nine screenprints, each 80 inches by 30, of women in little black dresses that nodded to The Black Dress, his iconic 1960 portrait of Ada repeated six times in a single canvas. There were big museum shows at the High in Atlanta, GA and at Colby College, ME, but the stand out memory for this critic were his windows at Barneys: with typical chutzpah Katz blacked out the store windows with a parade of starkly elegant figures etched into the glass, a provocation that pushed style outwards to the street rather than luring the stylish in, cajoling passersby with a frisson of exclusion. A related display of paraphernalia on the sixth floor produced for the store under the auspices of the Art Production Fund brought together linens, vanity products and kitchenware, all impressed with startling graphic flowers, heads, or dogs carved black out of white, white out of black. A beach spread purchased by this viewer to spare his couch from dog hairs was expensive for a towel but a bargain for an Alex Katz.

Francis Bacon at Gagosian (Madison Avenue), November 7 to December 12, 2015
When you are a world class modern master and the products of your late work seem, quite literally, washed out, the job of criticism, obviously, is to explain how dissipatedness is a sign of genius. For years, at Bacon retrospectives, of which there have been many, the oeuvre is shown to end on a dry, thin, almost evaporated note. But gather just late works, as Gagosian have done, intelligently and persuasively installed, and the late period does indeed cohere around faded grandeur as an organizing principle. Bacon, at his best, was brazenly decadent, anxiety inducing and tragic; this actually serves to make the “defects” of his late works a virtue. Inveterately inventive even as he wallowed in his own mannerisms, he could turn sterile precision into its own kind of terribilità.

Sean Scully at Montserrat, dedicated June 2015
Sean Scully turned 70 in 2015 and a slew of international events marked the occasion. Laurels included a major exhibition at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, a sculptural commission in south-western France and a sumptuous display in a palace on the Grand Canal, a collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale, where his land-sea-sky partitioned stripe paintings, reveling in a new gestural looseness, assumed a symbolic role in their temporary home akin to “il Sposalizio del Mare,” the allegories of Venice’s betrothal to the sea. But the jewel in the crown of his birthday celebrations took place in the mystically fabled monastic complex of Montserrat, in this hills overlooking Barcelona. For the Dublin-born, London-schooled, New York-tested and Munich-proved artist, Barcelona has for long been the third node in the split nucleus of his peripatetic career. Within Catalonian national identity, and by extension Scully’s identification with the city, Montserrat has profound resonances, so the invitation to decorate an entire chapel – he has provided paintings, windows and sundry sacred furnishings – provides its own kind of allegorical significance in relation to his mentors, Rothko and Matisse.

The post Old Year’s Resolutions: Eight great shows I didn’t review appeared first on artcritical.

September 9 to October 11, 2015
208 Forsyth Street, between Houston and Stanton streets
(also on view at 237 Eldridge Street)
New York City, 917-861-7312

This author hereby posits the existence of a Cult of Painting. Its adherents don’t call it that, or think of themselves as cultists, necessarily. But it operates akin to the manner of the ancient mystery religions. The insiders engage in arcane discussions. They both revere and debate the tradition, hoping to squeeze new insights out of it. There is pleasure and pain, if only of the visual kind. They practice metaphorical or actual drunkenness as a sacrament. I could name several high priestesses – Jackie Saccoccio, Carrie Moyer, and Elisabeth Condon are among those whose works I have contemplated   – but on the occasion of her current exhibition at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, I hail the highness of Kyle Staver.

When I recently wrote a TIP for artcritical.com for her show, saying that not since Lester Johnson had anyone gotten such mileage out of mythology, I had no idea that Johnson was Staver’s teacher at Yale. Johnson spent much of the 1960s incorporating classical imagery into his work, including several treatments of the Three Graces. I’m no oracle, but we aspirants (I’ll admit to membership in the cult) sometimes get impressions through mysterious channels. I think of Lennart Anderson painting beautifully despite the aging of his eyes. Staver is a longtime friend of Anderson’s and has sat for him regularly. She’ll inherit his mighty powers, as disciples are said to receive a guru’s by supernatural transmission.

Not that she paints like him. Her style harkens back to Bay Area Figuration, in particular the triumphs of David Park. One canvas from 2011 at Steven Harvey, Releasing the Catfish, shows a woman in a bathtub-like rowboat giving the day’s catch back to the lake as seagulls loom in the foreground. Park’s work went from intimiste to iconic over the course of his heartbreakingly short career. Staver has long felt compelled to retell her family’s stories, iconically in their way, but not so much as to defeat all the specifics. At the same time she brandishes what I regard as the mark of a true colorist: her luminous grays – such as the slate-colored water, the shadows on the gulls, the fish’s scales, and the boater’s bikini – appear as full-blown hues, not mere tints of black.

In her more recent paintings, mythology supplies enough storyline to give her figures, soaked in a vat of Cubism just long enough to become delightfully rubbery, something to do. Alexi Worth’s catalogue opens with a quote from the artist, “Oh no, none of that matters. I don’t care about mythology.” Worth protests, “…it’s clear that Staver does care about these ancient stories, cares passionately enough to re-imagine them again and again.” I counter in turn: take her at her word. Her Leda (2015), far from depicting a seduction or a rape, is a moonlit scene of post-coital bliss with a handsome waterfowl. They even put a checkered picnic blanket down. Staver, like Park in his late years, felt a need to escape domestic subject matter, and legends provided her a way forward. They otherwise retain the deliciously lazy atmosphere that characterizes her pictures from the 2000s of couples bathing and hanging around the house.

In the work of Johnson, mythology carries dire psychological urgency. Staver draws sweeter water from the same well. The cartoon-like elegance of her rendering  retains its carefree joy even when tackling the subject of Ganymede (2015), for which she produced a magnificent canvas of a gigantic eagle dangling a youth who elongates in a royal-blue sky full of cottonball clouds. It’s vertiginous, but the boy’s expression is coolly bemused and the eagle’s is, at worst, cranky.

A simultaneous and revelatory show of Bob Thompson (whose influence Staver acknowledges) and the madcap Louis Eilshemius at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery prompts me to wonder if there’s a mythological-modernist tradition that we ought to consider more thoroughly, with Staver as its current chief practitioner. While some curator works on that, the painters continue their contemplative rites. Days ago I witnessed a conversation between fellow painters on social media in which Shaun Ellison said that “all art making is like exorcism” to which Frankie Gardiner recalled words of Philip Guston:”The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make.” Peter Shear then added wisdom from Picasso, “If we give spirits a form, we become independent.”

And all these are truths, as far as the Cult is concerned.

The post Hail the High Priestess: Kyle Staver and the Cult of Painting appeared first on artcritical.

July 9 to  August 7, 2015
535 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 647 1044

A perverse combination of BDSM homoerotic fantasies, ‘50s French poster graphics and modest quotidian moments marks Anthony Iacono’s debut exhibition. Together with two short, less than compelling Bruce Nauman-like videos, eighteen impeccably crafted collages of painted paper, mostly 24 by 19 inches done this year, were executed with a suave brio that belies their kinky preoccupations. I’m not sure whether Iacono’s delight in color, form, and composition camouflage his darker fetishist fascinations, or the other way around, but his jitterbug between form and content has a charming syncopated beat.

Though factually collages, by appearing like paintings, these works queer picture making, undermining and subverting expectations of how a conventional genre painting should behave. There are constant double-entendres humming through the work, from the obvious (Fruit) to the sly (Cantaloupe, Peach and Rug Burn). In this latter work the peaked slices of cantaloupe in a white bowl, rhyme with a negative space between a forearm and tricep. The peach-colored elbow bruise of a cropped figure resting his arms on a table echoes the blushing piece of fruit at his side, and implies a rough sexual encounter on the burn-inflicting, absent rug of the title. Even this show’s name, Crudités at Sunset, implies not only the early evening, pre-dinner nosh at a cocktail party, but in a larger sense, minor off-color behaviors in the twilight of the painting enterprise.

Fragments of bodies in these works mostly function, along with plants and fruit, as still life forms. A young male body, often in chaste white underpants and gym socks, becomes the center of erotic fascination, as in Hanging Plant where a potted begonia is suspended by a hook from the nipple of a bent over torso in white briefs that frames the scene. But in Shrimp Cocktail, where seven tiger-striped crustaceans dangle from a martini glass and, with a lemon, balance precariously on parallel, naked butt-cheeks, it is only our presupposition that the supine figure facing away from us is male.

On the other hand the pink-tipped large aubergine breasts that rest on a table like sharp knees and support a water-filled vial of daisies in the décolletage in Vase, are undeniably female. There is so much that is provocatively improper about this painting (including the rhyming yellow-nippled lemon shape protruding from the right), that the implied racial incorrectness involved in using dark-skinned tits as a carafe holder in some kind of disturbing bondage play shall almost go unremarked.

Screen-based reproductions of his work fail to convey the nuances of Iacono’s process. Each colored area seems to have been separately cut from painted paper and then pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. The surfaces therefore have a subtle relief, which produces sharply defined edges, and avoids the painterly conundrum of deciding how to handle the interaction where two colored shapes meet. This could result in a conventional modernist flatness, but the shapes, shaded and highlighted with such a light touch of the airbrush, or cut perspectivally, tend to carve out a shallow space and create a point of view that implies psychological content. There are of course echoes of Mattise cut-outs in this, and it is also similar to the way David Salle’s recent large paintings were collaged together from painted pieces of canvas. Iacono’s work is much more pristine than Salle, but it made me curious how these might look if they were much larger, attached to canvas, and not under glass.

This exhibition makes a good case for Iacono’s place in the burgeoning group of painters investigating the abstract pictorial properties of representation. Of course these paintings have roots in the work of several older artists. The stylized hair and drawing in a particular piece, Bag, depicting a wide hipped, jaundiced female back and arm, brought Alexi Worth to mind. Nevertheless Iacono’s sarcastic wit and stylish execution evidence a unique sensibility. This is an impressive first show.

The post Cocktail Hour: Anthony Iacono at P.P.O.W. appeared first on artcritical.

March 26 to April 25, 2015
535 West 22nd Street, 2nd Floor
Between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 247 2111

Alexi Worth’s latest solo exhibition at DC Moore, “Green Glass Doors,” consists of six paintings tied together by similar size, content, and a Coke-bottle green palette. The theme of the show, as implied by the title, involves glass doors that appear to be the entrances to condominium buildings or boutique shops. The exact identity of the doors is ultimately unimportant, as Worth seems more interested in their formal qualities: his paintings are, like the doors some of them depict, simultaneously transparent and closed.

Worth uses non-traditional supports and techniques in his work. Painting with airbrushed acrylic on nylon mesh or Mylar has the effect of layering illusionistic space on top of the painting’s actual, material space. In areas where the surface is translucent, the stretchers and the wall behind the painting can be glimpsed. This gives each painting two sources of space: the illusionistic space of the painted image and the space behind the painting that can be seen through the mesh. These perspectives often clash with each other, such that perspectives cannot be synchronized to create a coherent sense of spac

365 (all paintings 2015) presents the strongest example of this, with a head-on view of a glass door and the various opaque notices and work permits taped to it. The door is a convincing example of illusionistic painting verging on trompe l’oeil. The painting’s literal interior space, seen through the translucent mesh, presents another perspective that contradicts the painting’s illusionism. Looking through the painting, the depth of the stretchers is inconsistent with the depth of the illusion. 365 isn’t a mere anamorphic trick: there is no magic spot where the viewer can stand to make these viewpoints snap into place. On the contrary, the painting flips back and forth between illusion and reality, never settling in one position for very long

Voyeurism — the perverse joy of seeing what one isn’t supposed to see — is another recurrent motif in this show. In fact, all of the works on view have some voyeuristic elements, whether in terms of content (a hand reaching under a fig leaf) or material (an inventory number written on a stretcher bar). The painting Green Bedroom shows the entangled bodies of a couple in flagrante delicto, each groping under the other’s shirt. With their heads outside the frame and their bodies devoid of personality, these lovers are anonymous to the viewer. They could represent a consequence of living behind glass doors: the desire to be seen and the need to frustrate the act of viewing.

Faced with a locked glass door, one can peek inside, but sooner or later there is a wall that cannot be breached without permission. In Worth’s paintings it is the literal wall behind the canvas that frustrates the surface’s illusion of depth. This frustration prevents the paintings from resolving into architectural studies or green and white erotica. In the places where the wall is visible through the mesh, the painting ceases to be a flat canvas and becomes a veil that hangs between two ways of seeing, between the real and the illusionary, between painting and the world.

The post Through a Green Glass Door Opaquely: Perspectives in Alexi Worth appeared first on artcritical.

March 7 to April 25, 2015
171 Chrystie Street, between Delancey and Rivington streets
New York City, (347) 938 2931

One of the better consequences of the much maligned The Forever Now exhibition at MoMA has been to raise the question of what might really constitute significant painting today? With its snarky title, From Now On In, the show of seven mid-career painters at Brian Morris Gallery, attempts, if not a definitive answer, at least a very different kind of conversation.

Significant painting is so difficult to attain today because it requires a navigation of a dynamic that acknowledges arbitrariness while embracing specificity. Lacking an overriding ideology, there is no particular mandate anymore to make a painting any particular way with any particular subject matter (earnest exhortations from various painting sects notwithstanding). While admitting their methods are arbitrary, painters must then find a way to be specific, to make decisions that matter and elucidate a particular structure and feeling as it evolves.

The seven painters included here build their paintings in ways that are neither programmatic nor simply rendered, each one taking a very different approach to ambiguity. Alexi Worth, though always presenting a recognizable image, makes the “why” of his images disconcerting. How does a painting of a hand crumpling paper relate to one of a topless and faceless sunbather with a plastic iced tea container? The crumpling hand indicates creative frustration; perhaps the twisted form and obscured face of the bather indicate another kind of frustration. Or perhaps it was just intended as a Coppertone ad gone horribly wrong. Through his use of stencils and airbrush on an open-mesh nylon, Worth fuses a flatness of outline that contradicts indications of volume and perspective, and the missing face of the bather seems to appear as a silhouette formed by the line of a receding wave on the sand.

Fabian Marcaccio also uses unusual materials and grounds but in order to hide imagery that could prove disturbing. His paintings, composed of hand-woven manilla rope, climbing rope, alkyd paint, silicone, wood, and 3D printed plastic, overwhelm us with the scale of their physical presence while indicating an expressionist touch where one often does not exist. The woven ropes are like an enlarged canvas, and feel as if we were viewing a microscopic detail of a De Kooning. But from across a long room one painting suddenly coalesces into an image of a zombie head, while the other, In Vitro Transfer: Origin of the World, with its nod to Courbet, portrays the injection of a fertilized egg into a womb revealed by an open vagina.

Michael Berryhill obscures his imagery with fuzzy pastel layers of color on the rough weave of linen canvas. He uses figure/ground ambiguity – as does Worth– but with imagery that barely coheres, more like Marcaccio. In Full Blown TV Tray, brown X’s and concentrically scalloped brushstrokes help us discern a TV tray on a braided rug. But the tray supports an anomalous exhaust hood (apparently the Full Blown of the title) that is elucidated by a few yellow brushstrokes on scrapings of light blue over blood orange. Berryhill’s images seem familiar yet their juxtapositions are baffling, only making sense through a use of punning titles and the logic of painting.

Marcaccio’s and Berryhill’s paintings also converse with Steve DiBenedetto’s work. DiBenedetto has lately been rethinking the flatness that used to be the source of his imagery. By layering images on top of other images, the archeology of his painting creates both space and ground. In Feedback, the tentacles of a black octopus entwine with the blades of a black helicopter of equal size, carving out the space but creating a drama that could be a metaphor for the old struggle of nature v. technology.

The painting energy and construction of Lydia Dona’s paintings, with their layers of imagery, relate to DiBenedetto, but her work suffers in this setting. Unfortunately, compared to the other paintings, hers lack the structural organization to create clarity of scale that might make her ambiguity engaging, but in this context feels merely chaotic.

The struggle to develop structure is ultimately what unites the paintings in the show. It is how we make the connection between Carrie Moyer’s paintings and Tom Burckhardt’s. Both use biomorphic geometry to create allusions to representation, which also link them structurally to Worth. Moyer employs flat monochromatic grounds to isolate and unite the arbitrary collisions of more painterly areas into forms that seem vaguely figural and imperious. Moyers encourages these allusions with evocative titles, such as Mythic Being and Three Queens.

Like Moyer, Burckhardt also creates representation through geometric construction and translucent layering, though his biomorphic geometry references ‘50s decorative arts. But Burckhardt’s painting process alters these references to produce images on an intimate scale. Titles indicate that we are looking at an abstraction of a finger on a touch screen, or a buoy on water.

What is compelling about this particular exhibition is that it requires our attention to make sense. It is peculiar to realize how contemporary art so often ignores the idea that it should be looked at, and contents itself to being written about. But here we actually are invited to examine these paintings and think about why they are together, and then supply the cohesion. This is not an exhibition of “end-game” painters. While the paintings insist on their material presence, they also use that presence to create images. The very idea of an image presupposes a viewer, and particularly these images, which embrace the kind of ambiguity that tantalizes with unstable possibilities of resolution. Nevertheless, those possibilities create a spirit of hope here, and if painting might not be dead, then certainly the ghost of its former significance haunts this enterprise.

The post It’s Not What You Think: From Now On In at Brian Morris/Buddy Warren appeared first on artcritical.

Eva Díaz, Ken Johnson and Chloé Rossetti joined David Cohen to discuss exhibitions of Lorna Williams, Wolfgang Tillmans, Alexi Worth and Brock Enright, June 7, 2013 at the National Academy Museum

The post June 2013: Eva Díaz, Ken Johnson and Chloé Rossetti with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

Photographs by Robin Siegel, Installation shots by Allyson Shea, Report by David Cohen
click any image to activate slideshow

A Mark Greenwold show is hardly less rare than a new painting from this OCD master of minutiae:  to give the fellow a normal-sized show you pretty much need to stage a mini-survey.  That’s what his new dealers,  Sperone Westwater, have done for the veteran fantasy realist on the third floor of their Norman Foster-designed railroad gallery on the Bowery, in a show that takes its title from a line of Stanley Cavell’s hand-inscribed at its entrance: “The cause of tragedy is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change.”

His admirers were out in force the Friday night of Frieze weekend, including a number of sitters in his bizarre psycho-dramas.  Amongst the latter category were Chuck Close and James Siena who besides their visages and birthday suits also contribute to Greenwold’s visual vocabulary in the form of their trademark pictorial marks – Close’s lozenges, Siena’s algorithmic zags – that the artist uses as kind of thought bubbles hovering over his dramatis personae’s heads.

In his New York Sun review of Greenwold’s last survey, at DC Moore Gallery in the Fall of 2007, artcritical editor David Cohen wrote in terms that still apply that “Mr. Greenwold revels in capturing each hair on a dog, or each thread in a carpet, with a nutty regard for exactitude

Like psychoanalysis, around which these strange dramas revolve, Mr. Greenwold’s painting mode supposes that no detail is to be ignored and that time is no object. Psychoanalysis is the key — if not to decoding these bizarre, narcissistic soul dramas, then at least to understanding the strange genre in which they occur. For Mr. Greenwold’s pictures occupy an ambiguous space nestled between allegory and narrative. Each of the figures feels highly isolated, and yet each one plays a function in relation to the action unfolding around them all.

On view at 257 Bowery between Houston and Stanton streets, New York City, 212.999.7337 through June 28, 2013

The post Killer Opening For “Murdering The World,” Mark Greenwold’s Long-Awaited Debut at Sperone Westwater appeared first on artcritical.

The School of Visual Arts launches its Fall 2010 season of lectures with painter and critic Alexi Worth in a talk organized by the School’s BFA Visual and Critical Studies Department.  Worth, who shows his visually witty art-historically referential hybrids of Mannerist painting and cartoonery at DC Moore Gallery. speaks at the School’s 133/141 West 21st Street building, Rooom 101C at 6.30pm Tuesday September 14.  Also up this week at the same venue is a panel titled “Not Nature Poems” with Rackstraw Downes, Brenda Iijima, Joan Richardson and Jonathan Skinner, moderated by Vincent Katz and Tim Peterson, in the first in what is billed as a “quips and cranks” series on poetics in the arts. The panel takes place Thursday, September 16, same time and room as Worth.  Both events are free and open to all.

The National Academy Museum, host with artcritical magazine of The Review Panel, has announced the line-up for this popular series for 2010-11 which takes place despite the overhaul of their premises this season, where most else of their programming in on hold.  The season includes newcomers to the panel Barbara MacAdam, John Perreault, Alexandra Anderson Spivy, Elisabeth Kley, Hilarie Sheets, Eva Diaz, Marjorie Welish, Ariela Budick and Jeffrey Kastner along with returning favorites Stephanie Buhmann, Peter Plagens, Blake Gopnik, Robert Storr, Sarah Valdez, Joan Waltemath, David Carrier and Colleen Asper.  As ever, the series is moderated by articritical’s Publisher/Editor David Cohen.  The season launches September 24 when Lance Esplund, Faye Hirsch and Andrea K. Scott, all “repeat offenders” on the Review Panel, join Cohen to review Adam Fuss at Cheim & Read, Roman Signer at the Swiss Institute, Arlene Shechet at Jack Shainman and Joan Synder at Betty Cuningham.  At 1083 Fifth Avenue at 6.45pm.

The New York Studio School lecture series launches October 5 with painter Suzan Frecon, currently exhibiting at David Zwirner Gallery, talking about her work, and sculptor William Tucker addressing thoughts to Matisse Sculpture the next day.  Both talks at 6.30pm and free, but patrons will need to get there early to secure seats for some of the speakers this season who include Michael Taylor on Gorky, David Cohen on Sickert, Hayden Herrera on Frida Kahlo, Renaissance scholar Alexander Nagel on “Two Prophecies of Modern Art,” and of course artists on their own work, including Phong Bui, Karlis Rekevics, Shahzia Sikander, and, on Thursday, November 4, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans.

The post Jabber, Jabber, Jabber… appeared first on artcritical.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/201600140″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Deborah Garwood, Blake Gopnik and Alexi Worth joined David Cohen to review Tacita Dean at Marian Goodman Gallery, Jenny Holzer at the Whitney Museum, Stephen Prina at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, and Peter Saul at David Nolan Gallery.

The post April, 2009: Deborah Garwood, Blake Gopnik, and Alexi Worth with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.